Apparently “half the Internet” was outraged, but I found Saturday Night Live’s “controversial” Islamic State sketch not just amusing, but sharp. In case you missed it:
Twitter users leapt to scold the skit — which parodies Toyota’s “My Bold Dad” Super Bowl ad, in which a father parts from his daughter who is leaving to join not the Islamic State, but the U.S. military — as “offensive,” “inappropriate,” and “in poor taste.” One commenter objected to the “moral equivalence” clearly being drawn between Islamic State militants and American servicemen.
Common sense was clearly lacking among many of these Twitter first-responders. The Islamic State is a horrid conglomerate of sadistic thugs that deserves an unpleasant end, and the sooner the better — and it would be absurd to think that SNL’s writers disagree. The easily aggrieved Internet horde (composed of elements of both Left and Right in this case) seems to have confused Saturday Night Live, the entire job of which is mockery, with the White House Communications Department (the job of which is self-mockery).
Now, to be sure, we would not want to minimize the gravity of the threat posed by the Islamic State. But it is possible to poke fun at the perpetrators of evil without trivializing their deeds. Respecting De gustibus and all that, it would have been clearly “beyond the pale” had SNL made light of the Islamic State’s well-publicized tactics — for instance, made a “joke” of the martyrdom of two dozen Egyptian Christians or a burned-alive Jordanian pilot. But SNL focused its mockery on precisely that element of the Islamic State phenomenon best suited for ridicule: its bizarre attractiveness to young men and women, here in the United States and abroad.
For that reason, the sketch is not just amusing; it is a rather savvy response, of which we could use more. Consider: Those young people going off to join the Islamic State — Somali boys from the Twin Cities, or schoolgirls from London — think they are joining some grand and glorious cause; they are going to annihilate the infidel and immanentize the eschaton. You can’t argue someone down from that nuttiness. But SNL’s humorous treatment bypasses argument to simply prick the bubble of grandiosity by reducing Islamic State militants to what — from a certain angle — they really are: bearded yokels whose overactive trigger fingers serve overactive imaginations.
Islamic extremists are, as we learned in Paris just a few weeks ago, people with no sense of humor. They have a perverse sense of self-importance that demands everyone take them as deadly seriously as they take themselves. One avenue of resistance open to us is to do precisely the opposite. We can recognize the deadly seriousness of the danger they pose and the threats they make, and respond deadly seriously (for instance, with serious ordnance), while also recognizing that they deserve not just our missiles, but our unyielding mockery.
Why shouldn’t wit be one more weapon at our disposal?