The Ethics of Satire

It has been a number of years since I last watched “Saturday Night Live” – all due respect to the current cast, but I still think of the program in terms of skits like “Samurai Night Fever” and “Weekend Update with Dan Akyroyd and Jane Curtain” with Gilda Radner doing Emily LaTella and Rosanne Rosanadana. Some of the various casts in the years since have included some excellent (and funny) actors, and they occasionally strike gold, but frankly, I’ve outgrown the show – and for the past decade I’ve usually had something better to do on Saturday nights…

This weekend, however, we were up late and decided to tune into the program because Hugh Laurie was guest hosting. In the U.S. he’s probably best known as a dramatic actor (from his work as the title character in the “House, M.D.” television series), but actually Mr. Laurie spent a lot of time in the UK doing skit comedy and variety work very much like the SNL standard programming (only generally a lot funnier). We figured it would be a good episode of the show, and in fact the old franchise proved it still has some life left. Little did we know we were going to be witnessing the birth of a new television controversy…

A story being reported this morning on MSNBC details the formal protests being registered by the office of New York Governor David Paterson and the National Federation of the Blind over the portrayal of the governor on the show’s “Weekend Update” segment. Paterson, who took over as governor of New York after his predecessor was implicated in a sex scandal earlier this year, has been responsible for a number of bizarre, unconventional and just plain dim-witted moves since assuming an office for which he was neither elected nor prepared, and is now in the situation of having to appoint a replacement for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Hillary Clinton. This situation is drawing even more attention following the train wreak created in Illinois by an apparently even more bumbling governor threatening to sell Senator Obama’s Senate seat to the highest bidder…

Mocking Paterson would be standard operating procedure for the SNL cast, which has cheerfully mocked practically every public figure to make headlines since the show’s inception; they had, in fact, mocked the Illinois situation and the conduct of Governor Blagojevich in the opening sequence of the same episode. But a storm of controversy has erupted because Governor Paterson is visually impaired – and the SNL skit took note of it, having the cast member impersonating the governor holding up a chart upside-down, wander in and our of camera shots, and so on. The governor’s office and any number of advocacy groups are lambasting the show for mocking the visually impaired, and claiming that the entire skit was an outrage…

What seems to be getting lost in all of the shouting is that the program was not mocking the governor for not being able to see, it was mocking him for being an idiot. There was no implication that blind people in general are bumbling or inept, or even that Paterson himself would somehow be less a buffoon if he were somehow given full vision. The skit did imply that the man himself is befuddled, dim-witted, and unfit for his office, but it is difficult to see how any of this is any worse than the series’ portrayals of the last seven Presidents, for example, or that of Governor Blagojevich just a few minutes earlier. The erupting firestorm appears to be happening entirely because the public figure being satirized in this case is visually impaired…

Which brings us to the obvious question of business ethics: Should a public figure who is handicapped be exempted from any of the satiric representations they would receive if they were completely normal? Specifically, if Governor Paterson were to sell Senator Clinton’s vacant seat at auction, the way Governor Blagojevich was recorded threatening to, or any other idiotic thing, should he be spared from any public ridicule simply because of his disability? Should the normal rules that govern treatment of public figures apply equally in this case? And if not, if a public figure gets a free pass because of his status as visually impaired, is that really the “equal treatment under the law” that all minorities are supposed to be accorded in this country?

It’s worth thinking about…