I have an uncontrollable need to make fun of everybody while engaging in habitual and indiscriminate sex. I always liked it when a one nighter would say, “Hey, you’re a funny fucker.” But when it finally struck me as odd that I was ridiculing people during the very act of trying to make more of them, what I had assumed was a compliment now sounded more like a diagnosis.
Satyrism is the compulsive need to have sex in a man. Which has to be a typo because I have never wanted to have sex in a man. I prefer to have it in a woman. But if you switch out man for woman in the definition it made me sound like a nymphomaniac. Which I am not.
And let’s face it, satirism is the obsessive need to make fun of people. To say cruel things, turning our targets into mere caricatures and then viciously harpooning them. Our tools are exaggeration, derision, distortion and misrepresentation. And we, as a group, are quite mean when you think about it. Our only excuse is that with current events being what they are its obvious mental illness is enjoying a new found popularity. On both ends of the spear.
Having either of these afflictions, satirism or satyrism is bad enough but engaging in both simultaneously has to be particularly dysfunctional. But with me, one without the other cripples both. Last evening I tried coitus sans humor. I kept my eyes closed the entire time and didn’t say a word. It was a flaccid performance at best. When she’d finally had enough she ended the tryst in mid stroke and stomped out of the house saying, “You aren’t very good at that. And you’re not very funny either.”
So to my fellow satirists out there. Have any of you found yourselves struggling with both of these conditions? If so, please let me know. And if not, don’t get too smug and try to make yourselves feel better at my expense. Because either way, all’s you’re trying to do is screw somebody else.
Editor’s suggestions:
https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2007/01/hitchens200701
https://uk.askmen.com/dating/curtsmith_500/594_why-women-arent-funny.html
https://christopherhitchens.net/why-women-arent-funny
https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2008/04/hitchens200804
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/14/opinion/louis-ck-not-funny-harassment.html