Academic Writing Talk Episode 9: “The Book is Not the End”—Teaching about Satire and Society with Charisse L’Pree

Transcript:

Aure: Welcome back to the Writing Talk podcast. My name is Aure Schrock and I'll be your guide to academic writing today. Today I'm going to interview Charisse L'Pree Corsbie-Massay, who is a client of mine… I helped her with two books of hers, one called 20th Century Media in the American Psyche: A Strange Love, published by Rutledge in 2020, and also Diversity and Satire: Laughing At Processes of Marginalization, published by Wiley Blackwell in 2022. Charisse has a really amazing connection between her teaching and her writing in that a lot of what she writes about she tries out in the classroom. So I thought I'd reach out to Charisse to talk about how she approaches the relationship between publishing and teaching, and also how she infuses both with a sense of social justice. So we'll just jump in. Yeah, so thank you so much for joining me, Charisse! You recently had a book published by Wiley Blackwell titled “Diversity in Satire.” Congratulations, by the way. Thank you… it was a pleasure working with you on this book, and I can't believe it's been like two years already, somehow!

Charisse: Time is an illusion, man.

Aure: Time is a flat circle, but satire endures.

Charisse: Very true.

Aure: So since you wrote a whole book on the topic, why is satire so relevant for our modern age and what can it do that simple humor cannot?

Charisse: Why is satire important for our modern age? Because everybody fancies themselves a satirist, and I think a lot of people say, I'm a satirist because it makes them, or this is satire, it makes them feel like their jokes have a moral fortitude, right? I'm not just a jokester, I'm a satirist. I'm pointing out the absurdities of reality when in many cases most people are just cracking jokes that they and their friends get, and then when confronted on the problematic nature of their jokes or whatever the response is, I'm a satirist. Having said that, I think it's important to recognize that satire is defined by what it does, not what it looks like. I think as the media marketplace, the media ecosystem diversifies almost infinitely, we have to know that satire looks different in different formats. A satirical tweet may look exactly the same as a dispassionate tweet, but does something uniquely different or sometimes a satirical tweet doesn't do anything different. So I think it's important to talk about satire, critically, academically, professionally, dispassionately, so that we don't fall into the hole of, oh, I made satire and you can't critique me for it because if you critique me for it, you're the real racist.

Aure: That's great, and I think it's good to draw a clear line between your main concept that you can actually justify in terms of how it works and how people wield terms, because those two things may not line up at all.

Charisse: Absolutely.

Aure: And also I remember your book and even your concept of satire deeply involves pushing back on marginalization. How did this idea inspire your writing and help you develop the book itself?

Charisse: I will say in response to that, I teach Race, Gender, and Media. It's the required course. The title is not my favorite, especially because we discuss a wide variety of other topics. For those of you who have read the book or are interested in the book, each chapter looks at satirizing different sociocultural categories, so satirizing class, satirizing gender, satirizing sexuality, and satirizing race. And that format in this entire book emerged from the class… which is designed to push back on marginalization or more importantly, teach media professionals how they themselves can push back on marginalization with their day-to-day employment efforts. I wrote it because I love satire and I would frequently use satire in class only to find how the students wouldn't laugh at what they were supposed to be laughing at or use satire to reinforce marginalization of other people.

The entire preface of the book goes into, here's how things happened in my class, here's how things happened at my university, here's things that happened at my university before I even got here. So kind of laying the foundation of how I evolved into this subject matter, both from a personal passion of satire, a research area of representation of marginalized identity and a teaching obligation of instructing mostly white, mostly… socioeconomically privileged students from the northeast to walk through these complicated ideas of marginalization and then pushing back on marginalization in a format that they think they love, but they've never been asked to describe why they love it, what they're laughing at or what they're watching, what they're creating and what they're laughing at works to reinforce or disrupt processes of marginalization.

Aure: That's one of the reasons I reached to you is just because of the very applied nature of what you wrote about and the fact that so many of these ideas came out of a real need for teaching this material and a real need for a book to exist on this. Do you have any great examples of activities that went really well or really badly?

Charisse: Sure, and I apologize if I repeat stuff that's in the book, but buy my book!

Aure: Buy her book, everyone!

Charisse: In the preface I talk about showing this great bit on the Chris Hayes show featuring Cord Jefferson. The piece is generally titled A Culture of White Violence, which came out of a cord Jefferson essay looking at how we talk about white violence versus how we talk about Black violence. And so Cord Jefferson went on Chris Hayes and the whole thing starts off with a big old title card like this is all satire and basically reskins revoice white violence through the lens of the riots that happened at the 2013 World Cup of Surfing in San Diego, reskins it with the language of Black violence. So they don't have fathers, they're learning this in their lacrosse camps.

He goes out of his way to dismiss accusations of racism by saying he is a white girlfriend or a white mom. These are rhetorical strategies that we see from major journalism and media outlets when talking about Black violence or violence perpetrated by Black folks. It seems absurd when we flip it to use the exact same rhetorical strategies to talk about how violence perpetuate or talk about violence that is perpetuated by white folks. And I remember showing this in class and all the students laughed at the right times. They were laughing at the jokes. Then when I asked them what they were laughing at, they were like “white stereotypes.” They didn't really see, and these are students at a top-tier professional journalism and media school. They didn't see how it was attempting to poke fun at how media personalities talk about violence perpetrated by Black people.

And so that was a big wake-up call for me. And I had used that clip before in my long-form class, so where it's 15 weeks, but then I started the five-week class off with it only to find that the students were completely lost in the sauce. And for me, that was a big eye-opener, recognizing that satire just dumped in someone's lap may not have the intended effect. It might actually have a counter effect for a lot of students. They're like, oh, this dude's making fun of white people. That's racist. It can actually have a counter effect because satire by design is supposed to poke at institutions of power without the institutions of power recognizing that that's what they're doing. That's what the jester did. The jester made fun of the king to the king's face, but the king didn't recognize it, but everyone else in his court did. Right? So it is by design obfuscating its critique, and that is a much more complicated task that became evident in my classroom, which led me to writing the book.

Aure: Do you think there was a moment that how younger generations view sat satire changed? This is almost getting into your previous book, which talks more about 20th-century media and a more psychological approach, but I'm just curious if that was a class that there was no going back on or that was a sea change you saw?

Charisse: So I will say I had this conversation at an event hosted by Bob Thompson, literally last semester. So Bob Thompson is a major pop media critic with whom I also host a podcast with. And we were watching, he was airing, it's like a small luncheon. Let's look at old TV kind of thing. He was airing in the wake of Norman Lear's death, a panel that was hosted at Newhouse with Norman Lear and some other prominent 1970s television satirists and Norman Lear was asked by a current professor, why do you think speaking as the professor now, the person with the question, they said, my Black students are very bothered by all in the family. They do not see it as a joke. It's very hurtful. How do you react or what do you have to say to those folks? And Norman basically said they don't get it.

And he said that repeatedly when people were like, oh, are you worried about reinforcing people? Archie Bunker for President, people reinforcing Archie Bunker. And he was like, those people don't get it. I don't care about them. And so I tell my students, I'm like, one day I hope for all of you to have the power that Norman Lear can say “F him” to audiences, but that day is not today. So as they were talking, I realized this and I made this point in the collective that these days when I show all in the family, in class, all the students are offended, all of them. They are extremely bothered by the antics of Archie Bunker. They don't think his shit is funny. Excuse my language. They just can't. And I share this. I have so many quotes, I can't believe they let this air on television that is like I get at least three of those every semester. I can't believe they showed this on television. Also with some stuff from South Park, early South Park, early Simpsons, I can't believe the office, I can't believe they showed this on television. They're turned off. They can't see past that.

Aure: Well, I mean, I think that's actually a reason that books like yours and teaching like yours should still exist because we should still talk about these things. Certainly. And you mentioned one of your podcasts at the risk of being that cliche of doing a podcast on podcasts, you also produce two podcasts: “Critical and Curious,” and “SNL 101.” Why are these forms of public scholarship important to you and how did they relate to your writing and teaching?

Charisse: Both of these came about in two different pathways. The first one, Critical and Curious, we started producing in 2017, I believe, which is now forever ago, primarily because Bob Thompson and I wanted to do a class. We wanted to write a whole paper and do a class on Fast and Furious, and its critical value from a race, gender, class, American history, media perspective. Having said that is hard to find time to write in an academic fashion in a way that other academics will value and then clear the peer review process and all of that stuff. So we were like, oh, let's just do this in the classroom. We'll have a class and we'll assign readings and we'll talk about Fast and Furious. But then of course, then you have to get through the bureaucracy that is academic class schedules. And neither of us really want to fight that either. So we're like, or we can just have a conversation and we can do one on, and that's what we end up doing. So if you listen to Critical and Curious, it's kind of attending a lecture series on Fast and Furious, and then eventually Keanu Reeves and Romeo and Juliet. That's it. So watch the movie Come to a lecture series. So kind of embracing a fun format that allowed us to work through ideas pertaining to research without necessarily having to adhere to the research timeline.

That’s just been a joy, that's a straight passion project. We get together and we nerd out about things that academics generally don't nerd out about. So Fast and Furious, Keanu Reeves, and our third season was on Romeo and Juliet and the sort of pop trash retellings of Romeo and Juliet. The second one, which started last fall with Lavelle Anderson philosopher philosophy professor who does work on ethics of racial humor, philosophy, and ethics of racial humor emerged because what I learned, I'll say, so before I get into that, what I learned is at the end of the first book, the book is not the end. If I was to give your clients your list, cut that if I was to give your readers a note, the book is not the end. Sometimes it's just the beginning. So when I finished the first book and it was out there, I was like, cool, I'm done with this project.

Give me my flowers and everyone should read my book and great, and then I'll just ride that wave. Having said that, with the second book, and then I had to move on to the second book, I had two contracts. So I knocked out these two books in two years with the second book. I'm realizing what I needed to do was continue the sort of satirical research agenda so that I could cite the hell out of my book and make that book work for me. So now Lavelle and I have a series of projects looking at the effectiveness of satire, a book chapter on the racial wealth gap in Black American television, comedy television. We have a survey analysis of Onion articles that tackle classism and how people respond, just kind of short-form written satire in the form of the Onion. And another one where we're looking at disabled standup.

Charisse: So standup comedians who identify as disabled and the clip, they're like standup comedy clips. They post on Instagram. So it's the podcast and the SNL podcast, right? So the SNL podcast is really, we were trying to think about how we could do something similar to what Bob and I do, but that was also way heavier. So now what we do instead is we meet on every Monday. So we want to be timely. Most of my podcasts as the nature of academics, they're like, whatever. I post it when it gets posted, an article takes two years to go through peer review, whatever. It's always evergreen, it's always valuable. But what we're trying to do is be more timely. So every Monday after SNL, we get together and we talk about how we would use three of the previous week's sketches in the classroom. Again, it's very much educational oriented while simultaneously a first draft of a long form academic thought piece on these various artifacts. Same thing with the critical and curious. It allows us to practice analysis, to record brainstorming. We can actually see how the academic process works while simultaneously not losing all the exciting, valuable stuff that happens in every conversation with every coworker, colleague, and collaborator.

Aure: I love that expression: “the book is not the end.” I know it may seem counterintuitive since I'm now well into being a professional academic editor and writing coach to that statement because I'm, the reason I like that expression is just because I feel like there's so much weight put on the academic book that authors can kind of lose sight of the fact that the book is a mortal thing. It's not transcendental. It can do things, but it's also part of a long-form research trajectory that can sustain you in ways that maybe is different from teaching or academic writing. And so it's refreshing to kind of hear that from you that these books were important for you, they helped you, but there was also something after. And one book led to another. I have a long theory about sophomore or second or third books being better than academic author’s first books, just because there's so much that I think gets built up by academia. You must do the book and it must be so important and groundbreaking and change the world. And I am a big believer in that. But at the end of the day, it's also… it's a book.

Charisse: Yeah, I completely agree. And honestly, that first book is so funny. I was talking to a buddy of mine that I met in 2003 when I graduated from college and went on this Frank Zappa tour of Europe. And he is like, Cherise, you're one of those few people. You're one of the only person who 20 years ago said, I'm going to be a professor and I'm going to write a book. And here we are 20 years later and you're a professor and you wrote a book. So for me, writing that first book was really about putting a pin in a long academic trajectory. And having said that, when it got published, and I'm like, why am I not being invited on all the talk shows to talk about this book? I don't know what I expected, but that first one, I was like, I have birthed this thing technically two years after I birthed this other thing, my actual human child, but birth into this thing, marvel at it.

And everyone's like, yeah, that's nice. Good for you. Yay. I will also say for those listeners who are tenure track, I went up for tenure. I like to say I went up up for tenure on futures. That is to say I had two book contracts, but full disclosure, teaching issues of race and gender and diversity and marginalization to predominantly privileged students is so emotionally taxing. And I felt like I couldn't really do the formal academic writing because I was kind of putting a lot of emotional and cognitive energy into the classroom. So having the opportunity to sit back a little bit and use those somewhat traumatizing work experiences to create something else, it is therapeutic. I have a PhD in psychology. I'll go ahead and say it's therapeutic,

Aure: As is your right! And that brings us to the end of another episode of the Writing Talk podcast. Hope you found it interesting. Thanks so much, Charisse, for joining me today. As always, if you have any questions or want to work with me on a writing project, you can always find me at indeliblevoice.com. Hope you tune in next time, and thanks so much for listening.