Letters to Chicago (cont.)
a conversation w/a comedian about censorship, James Baldwin & what my novels are usually about
A few months back, I began writing letters to the Chicago-based satirist
. I don’t know Amran personally, but I’ve always enjoyed his wit, and it’s just one of the many joys of this Substack community that I now consider him a literary friend.In our first exchange, we discussed writing as a form of embrace versus escape, “punching up” versus “punching down” in comedy, and the inevitable realization that the answer always lies somewhere in betwen. It isn’t necessary to read that exchange before considering our two letters down below, but if you care to join us in the comment sections for what will be sure to be a lively dialogue, it’s worth giving our first “meeting” a gander.1
The following exchange goes deeper into questions of censorship/self-censorship in the USA, and how to avoid (if at all) the many minefields that accompany writing about contentious and/or sensitive subjects. I also share, for the first time on this space, a summary of the three novels I’ve written, and the reason why, in at least one way, they’re all connected.
Amran Gowani
Dear Samuél,
I trust your childless summer, spent galavanting around Europe, swimming in the Mediterranean, and dining on luxurious delicacies, with your beautiful family and lovely friends, wasn’t too taxing.
Here in Chicago – crime and corruption capital of the American Midwest – I’m delighted to report I kept my demonic hellspawn fed and clothed, survived another pilgrimage to the Confederate stronghold of Southwest Missouri, and managed to avoid tearing additional ligaments in my old-man knees. Most importantly, I didn’t get shot, which is no small feat in the more-firearms-than-humans war zone we call the United States. #first-world-problems
It’s not all doom and gloom, however. My local weed dispensary received final zoning board approval to open in the not-too-distant future, which means I’ll soon be perpetually high at the playground, terrorizing my bigoted neighbors.
Anyway, during our first letter exchange in May we discussed our respective writing philosophies, and whether we pursue this maddening, unprofitable enterprise to escape or embrace the horrors of reality.
At the end of our otherwise thoughtful, peaceful, introspective discussion, you just had to get all combative and accuse me of being a politically correct Marxist cuck who’s overly concerned with everyone’s feelings. I kid. Sort of.
In all seriousness, you closed your letter with a flurry of complex, compelling questions, which I’ve distilled as follows:
Can you create good comedy if you’re worried about offending?
What does it mean to be offended, and isn’t that an artifact of our cultural and societal baggage?
Isn’t “punching up” vs. “punching down” PC bullshit?
Shouldn’t humor, like all good storytelling, reveal the deepest, darkest aspects of our shared humanity, even if that makes our fellow monkeys uncomfortable?
Sadly, I’m not qualified to answer any of these questions. Luckily, we’re writing to each other via Substack, which has no content standards.
Now, let me address the proverbial elephant in this digital room: I will not, nor will I ever, advocate against free speech. Free speech can be annoying, and frustrating, and hurtful, and commandeered by bad faith actors to achieve bad faith ends. But free speech is also the bedrock of a free society. Full stop. Attempts to curtail free speech – from either side of the political divide – are inevitably shortsighted and destined to fail.
The ongoing culture war reveals attacks on free speech from #bothsides, though they vary widely in scope and scale. Per usual, liberal cucks like me tend to be misguided, while proto-fascists and Nazi cosplayers thrive on distilled malice.
Among the literary crowd, it’s popular to critique those on “the left” for their boneheaded attempts at censorship, which are ostensibly aimed at suppressing “offensive” material. These takes are often valid. Some of the dumber recent examples include the “cleansing” of the Roald Dahl canon, and Elizabeth Gilbert, of Eat, Pray, Love fame, indefinitely delaying her latest book because it was set in Russia – as if the country only recently descended into totalitarian warmongering. The lunacy extends to cinema, too. In The French Connection, a racial epithet uttered by hard-charging detective Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle, played by Gene Hackman, has been excised from the classic film. You don’t think New York City cops spewed racial invective in the nineteen-seventies? New York City cops are spewing racial invective right now.
And don’t get me started with the duncecaps on “the right,” who live to ban books they’ve never read. And who respond to any mention of humanity’s troubled past with: “your racist cuz CRT!!!” And any discussion of gender and sexuality with: “I’m scared of things I don’t understand and I refuse to practice empathy – GROOMING!”
This behavior is self-defeating.
It’s crucial to see how people thought and behaved in the past – and think and behave today – because that’s how we learn. My family experienced this last year when I read my kids the original Curious George, which is a racist metaphor for the transatlantic slave trade. Did I run to my local library or school board and insist they “cancel” the book? No. And I certainly didn’t tell my kids they can’t read or engage with anything Curious George-related again. I did, however, seize the opportunity to talk to them about the tragedy of American slavery, and to explain how its legacy still casts a long, dark shadow.
We build empathy and understanding when we develop context. But we can’t develop context without the whole story: good, bad, and ugly. Reflexively looking away from things that make us uncomfortable isn’t productive. It’s cowardly.
Okay, with that out of the way, I’ll focus the remainder of this missive on the lost art of nuance.
In my initial letter, I egomaniacally bragged about my “fearless” approach to humor and satire, but warned against causing “legitimate offense, or harm, or injury – especially to marginalized or put-upon groups.”
I wrote “legitimate” to convey I don’t view all forms of “offense” equally. Some people are offended by sex and curse words, and my response to those prudes would be this clip from Eddie Murphy: RAW.
We all know who ended up the villain in that exchange.
Nonetheless, you rightfully dissected my claim with your astute observation that all offense is, by definition, subjective. I fully concede that point. But I stand firm by my assertion that comedy can perpetuate legitimate harm or injury if it’s done poorly, and that’s something every serious writer should consider (you can decide if I’m a serious writer).
For example, let’s say a satirist wants to pwn rightwing nutjobs, which is always a just and moral choice. And let’s assume this satirist plans to do so by writing a fake stump speech, by a cynical ghoul, which parrots racist, anti-LGBTQ+ trash at said ghoul’s willfully ignorant supporters. What are the potential pitfalls?
Well, first of all, simply regurgitating grotesque, far-right talking points wouldn’t be very creative, because that nonsense happens every day on X-chan, or whatever Skycuck calls the dumbest site on the internet. Second, a lazily constructed piece of “satire” in this vein wouldn’t advance an argument, or highlight a hypocrisy, or challenge a perspective, or make the reader modify their thinking in any meaningful way. In fact, it would amplify – rather than subvert – the hateful messaging the satirist set out to undermine.
To make a piece like this effective, the satirist could pretend to endorse the rightwing lunatic’s beliefs while sneakily revealing their intrinsic hypocrisy. Imagine a zealot ranting and raving about government-mandated vaccinations – My body, my choice! – while simultaneously claiming abortion must be illegal in all instances. Or a tax-evading, money-laundering Ponzi schemer railing against government budget deficits and decrying “crime” in the “inner cities.”
As for the whole punching up versus punching down debate, my philosophy is simple: I bully the bully.
Bullies come in all shapes, sizes, and flavors, but what’s implied is power.
Vladimir Putin. Xi Jingping. Elon Musk. Clarence Thomas. MTG. Roger Goodell. MBS. Ann Coulter. Peter Thiel. My dickhead neighbors. My douchebag MBA classmates. My spoiled and ungrateful children, who have every demographic and socioeconomic advantage, and access to every resource imaginable, and who terrorize me and my wife.
Those motherfuckers need to get got.
Ultimately, as an alleged funny guy, I believe it’s my responsibility to push the comedic and artistic envelope. But, as a human who gives a shit, it’s incumbent upon me to avoid reinforcing harmful stereotypes, otherizing the otherized, and oppressing the oppressed.
All this said – and we’ve only scratched the surface of this complicated, multifaceted issue – I sense a brewing backlash to this notion that everything must feel “safe.” Compelling art makes us squirm, and there’s huge demand for that, despite what the loudest shitheads on social media say.
Some of the most rewarding feedback I’ve ever received came from my son’s former preschool teacher, who said my stories were: So cringe, but in a good way! Readers want to be challenged – constructively – and that’s my goal with every piece.
Alright, I’ve poorly articulated my approach to humor and satire, so I’ll kick this question to you: how do you infuse fearlessness into your essays and short fiction? Knowing these cultural land mines are lurking everywhere, how do you ignore the danger and forge ahead? Do you embrace the risk? Or is it something you have to overcome each and every time you sit down to write?
Looking forward to your thoughts.
Amran
Samuél
Dear Amran,
I’m writing to you from the mezzanine café in Paris’ Museum of Modern Art (Centre Pompidou), and my brain is cruising thanks to a fine-tuned combination of caffeine and nicotine. As always, it’s a treat to engage with you and your work via these letters. I have far more to say than I dare write, which is why I’m looking forward to interviewing you and finally hearing your voice—doesn’t that sound so romantic?—so we might delve into a different kind of dialogue more freely. I have no doubt the sparks shall fly.
You asked at the end of your letter, how do you infuse fearlessness into your essays and short fiction? (hint: I write novels), but before I delve into that, I want to acknowledge and respond to a few points you made about freedom of speech, censorship, and satire in this meta-modern age.
1
When it comes to language, censorship tends to reify the very thing it hopes to do away with—namely, causing discontent and ultimately harm. When we censor words, we imbue them with power and newfound meaning, and human beings are historically lamentable when it comes to following rules, wielding power, or relinquishing power once it’s in their grasp. My question about removing an epithet from a 1970s movie is: what does it say about a society when the words most closely-linked to its complicated and brutal past are not even nameable, let alone discussable?
To that end, I hope for a world that’s favorable to talented and witty writers like yourself who write pieces that poke fun at the hypocrisy on all sides of the aisle. You’re a comedian. You know truly valuable satire is never one-sided, because that’s the point of satire: to expose the inherent hypocrisy of the system as a whole whilst illuminating ways to remain human within it.
But James Baldwin has always said it better than anyone else, which is why I almost always defer to his wisdom when discussing the current American United Statesian conundrum. In his 1953 essay “A Stranger in the Village,” which is about his time in a picturesque Swiss hamlet, where nobody had ever seen somebody with skin darker than snow, he illustrates the danger of a society in which everyone is convinced of their own sanctity and innocence:
“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.”
In the USA, we are witnessing this devolution on all sides of the political spectrum, and I agree with your words: “Reflexively looking away from things that make us uncomfortable isn’t productive. It’s cowardly.” As someone who doesn’t live in the USA but discusses the current political situation every time I give a Nazi Occupation Tour of Paris, which is multiple times a week, it seems that whether a client is left, right, or center, many genuinely decent people are extremely selective when it comes to choosing which voices to listen to and which ones to denounce on some vague, unexamined moral principle.2
To conclude this flame-war inducing part of your Internet reading program, I’ll end with another James Baldwin quote from No Name in the Street: “All the western nations are caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism: this means that their history has no moral justification, and that the West has no moral authority.” TL;DR: sooner or later we’ll have to stop pretending that it’s only the other side’s fault. In the end, we’re all at fault in some way.
2
But I digress, and lest the mood get too tense, let’s briefly talk about our good friend, Mary Jane. Here in France, most weed is illegal, but various genetically modified versions of marijuana continue to skirt regulations (glory be; all hail the scientists who skirt government regulations). I had the recent pleasure of ingesting a Delta-9 edible (Delta-9 is a chemical found in THC; it just happens to not be considered illegal for some reason when isolated; go figure), and the good news is: it worked, and I floated through the world for a few hours as I intended by harnessing the opportunity to both escape and embrace the horrors of reality at a forgettable Parisian dance party. The bad news: it gave my socially anxious friend a panic attack; he went home. So it goes.
Onto your question:
How do you infuse fearlessness into your essays and short fiction? Knowing these cultural land mines are lurking everywhere, how do you ignore the danger and forge ahead? Do you embrace the risk? Or is it something you have to overcome each and every time you sit down to write?
To the extent that I’m aware of cultural land mines lurking everywhere (it’s truly hard to keep up these days), I don’t ignore the danger so much as trot into the minefield and see what remains of me once I’ve been blown into the air.
To use the subject of my upcoming novel as an example, because it’s the main literary project I’ve been focusing on for the better part of the last decade, I wouldn’t be able to write about subjects as contentious as the Holocaust, identity, substance abuse, and history vs. narrative if I didn’t believe these minefields were necessary to confront head-on. Importantly, however, contextualizing such lofty subjects in the human dimension helps me remember that whether I’m writing about a hero or a villain, a Gestapo secretary or a violent policeman or a disillusioned academic (the three protagonists of my upcoming novel), I’m only ever really writing about the complexity of what it means to be a human being.
As a writer, I’ve always felt a responsibility to investigate—and so illuminate— the darker aspects of the human condition. To quote the French Jewish historian Marc Bloch, who was murdered by the Nazis, “When all is said and done, a single word, ‘understanding,’ is the beacon light of our studies.” So to answer your question: if my work is infused with fearlessness (I appreciate the compliment), it’s probably because it often confronts some type of fear head-on. I have an undergraduate degree in Holocaust studies, a master’s degree in what amounts to the psychology of genocide, and an MFA in creative writing and the befuddling difference between history as “fact” versus narrative, which has a fancy academic word attached to it: historiographic metafiction.
I’ve written three novels and each deals with specific aspects of fear within the human condition (the second was published in 2015 and I’ll be publishing the third this winter). My first novel, Whistleblower (2012), which nobody has seen or will ever read, was a thinly veiled critique of a fear mongering society in which a government maintains power via consumerist ideology and pharmaceuticals. The protagonist, a disillusioned journalist who no longer believes he’s informing but rather scaring his viewers into submission, attempts to expose the celebrity President’s true intentions before something awful happens (sound familiar?).
My second novel, Slim and The Beast (Inkshares, 2015), was a coming-of-age story about the pursuit of passion versus career, brotherhood, and loneliness. The protagonist, The Beast, is an NBA-bound basketball player with a secret passion for cooking; the antagonist is a disgruntled military officer obsessed with a former cadet, Slim, whose friendship with The Beast reflects the type of positive male intimacy that patriarchal society does so well at suppressing.
One of the enduring challenges of being a writer human, at least for me, is our unwillingness to sublimate that peculiarly human form of darkness before it manifests in ugly, violent ways. This is what my third novel is about at its core, and it’s also probably why it’s taken me nine years to “finish” (nothing, of course, is ever finished, least of all history). The book’s metafictional themes are about history, memory, and the Nazi Occupation of Poland, and it opens with the tale of an eight-year-old boy who climbs up on a bookshelf and pulls down The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, only to spend the next twenty-five years studying the Holocaust and writing fiction to try and make sense of it (naturally, any similarities to real-world characters are entirely coincidental…).
I’m thirty-five years old, and it’s taken me that long to write this one, and publishing it independently represents other minefields and fears of which you speak, but I think I’ll leave it there for now. If history is any indicator, we’ve got many words to share with each other. For now, I bid you adieu, and want to say thank you for these exchanges, which force me to think about what I believe in and how I define myself as a writer in a deeply human way.
Here’s to continuing the never-ending conversation,
Samuél
I’m reminded of a conversation I had with a group of professors and board members of an esteemed American university back in 2015. There was a lot of fear about the political situation at the time, and there was a lot of talk about “monstrous individuals” and “psychotics” and “pieces of shit” and “un-American” thinkers, and what struck me most about the conversation was, whilst I agreed with many of the sentiments, the language that was being used to describe what amounted to tens of millions of human beings was well on the way to dehumanizing—and it’s only become more inflammatory ever since.
"I’m only ever really writing about the complexity of what it means to be a human being."
From one writer of the human experience to another, I appreciate this so much. With this as our guidepost, we'll never, EVER run out of stories to tell. 💜 People are just that damn interesting.
Another great exchange, fellas. 🥂
If you believe that poorly-delivered comedy can cause harm then isn't it necessary to also believe that poorly-delivered liberal comedy can harm a conservative? To take that further, can any genre of poorly-delivered liberal art harm a conservative? Or are we liberal writers going to give a free pass to our fellow liberal writers, however good or bad they might be? If a conservative believes that a liberal-authored book harms their child then why do we automatically discount them? There are a few controversial and often-banned books that are badly written and will almost certainly disappear from public consciousness in a few years. And, yet, we'd get destroyed if we spoke of the literary merits of certain banned books. Yes, there are times when we are defending a political ideal without also defending the artistic merit of books that explore that same ideal.