Definition of KORY STAMPER

1: Someone who is hot.

When I typed "Kory Stamper" and Google autocompleted “is hot” I learned something.

She's not a bikini model or porn shoot fluffer, but she has caused forty five people to ask of the following video “why do i get a boner when i see this woman?”



The problem is that Kory Stamper, in addition to being a total babe, is smart and a feminist too, so she understands how focusing on her physical qualities necessarily excludes focusing on her mental ones. Now, a case could be made that exploring the cause of our strange boners would be a positive way of celebrating the sexuality of a 30-something mother, but it's too difficult to extricate the objectifying MILFness with so little blood in my brain. So we will ignore her seductive delivery and instead engage her arousing ideas.



The word irony is a sore spot for anyone who doesn't use it. It gets thrown around as a sort of...thing (like, The Thing) that refers to anything remotely funny or unexpected. In Satire?blog's inaugural post I wrote that “[irony's] reclamation by hipsters caused a recession in the meaning market worse than the 1995 crash/release of Jagged Little Pill,” a sentence so darling I wanted to share it twice.

Perhaps Morissette and hipsters* aren't to blame though. In the above video Mrs. Stamper brings her Merriam-Webster descriptive-as-opposed-to-proscriptive lexicography-A-game and we find surprisingly, irony has been sloppily applied for at least 150 years. Merriam-Webster's Ask-the-editor videos have similarly softened my stance on who vs. whom, I hope vs. hopefully, and mercifully, they as a singular pronoun by revealing their lack of pedigree. It seems irony is just a problematic term for any human brain, past or present. It has a lot of conceptual pieces, specifically reversal, expectation, intention, and humor, all mixing and activating in response to each other simultaneously. Alone, a single drop of humor can muddy an entire lake of meaning, and when you try to assess intentions and expectations of different actors in the situation on top of it, it's no wonder irony is the solution anytime there's a whiff of displeasure in the air.

Kory Stamper also has a new blog. I just discovered it while writing this post. Like a window into her sexy lexicographer brain, the blog is about words, and it's pretty exciting to see that behind-the-scenes. I just glimpsed the body of text, but here's a a quick peek at one of its curves:

When I began reading and marking, I would begin reading an article and get halfway through it before realizing that I hadn’t marked a thing. I had made the classic rookie mistake of engaging with the content. If you’re on the hunt for interesting vocabulary–and particularly if you’re reading something that piques your interest–you need to intentionally miss the forest for the trees. You must focus only on the language used without caring at all about the point made with that language. But you can’t just skim. No, you need to be able to read closely enough to catch a subtle grammatical or lexical shift in a word, but not so closely that you forget your primary objective (MAKE CITATIONS). It’s not reading, and it’s not not-reading. It’s unreading. (source)

Suddenly I realize that's the climax of the text. I normally don't comment prematurely, but that was exceptionally tight prose. Beforeplaying next time I'll be sure to explore a little longer, dear reader. Anyway, there's nothing that can reduce my refractory period more than a tease of Orwellian doublethink like unreading. I'd bookmark it. Twice.



*Hipster is problematic for the same reason as irony. It works anywhere you want to refer to the counter-culture or exclusivity, broad concepts. And perhaps we might extend hipster to any search for authenticity, at which point this self-aware footnote reveals "is it satire?" to be a hipster question, thereby fulfilling both the premise and object of this blog simultaneously. And how! I think the appreciation of this...meta recursion...justifies us keeping the lower primates in zoos, right?

God I Love Awkward

This is a perfect example of kids who are probably too studious to belong to the meta-narrative of "I Love College."



This video is clearly a project for school and unless that project was to record a 4 minute music video during a 10 minute break, someone's GPA is taking a hit. Protip: reshoot until at least one person is lip syncing.

I'm not sure how to take this. On one hand it looks like a response to "I Love College," highlighting how far-fetched or unrealistic that lifestyle is for them. Unrealistic because for various ethno-economic reasons, they go to a school that wears uniforms. They probably have parents who require good grades. They may even live at home. They also scatter when girls appear, whereas Asher Roth makes out with them. "I Love College" excludes them because they know that at one dollar(s) a slice they will exhaust their allowance, and that imprudent spending begets debt.

In a sentence, their video says "look at how stupid 'I Love College' looks from prep school." "I wished we taped it because then I would have documentary evidence of being at said party." One of them even brandishes a condom at 2:00. Hah hah son, put the condom away, you'll need that for masturbating. Given that at least 100% more people in this video will graduate college than in Asher Roth's video, it reveals "I Love Collage" to be a juvenile, short-sighted creedo. And they are correct.

On the other hand, this analysis assumes their awkwardness and failure to deliver on even the most pizza-based lyrics is intentional, which is hard to accept. To think any of these kids danced their asses off last night and had this one girl completely naked you would have to be blind. One conspicuous student is wearing a helmet in their school's hallway and that is likely the craziest thing he's ever done; hopefully his parents won't find out.

They seem to be having fun, so maybe they like "I Love College." Bros stick around for their bros to come down the slide, ya know? Given that there's not a single head-bob in sync during the 4 minute video they need the "I Love College" ethic more than anyone. If they do indeed wish they could get the equally awkward girls at their school drunk, then this is not satire, it is an homage. It's a dress-up. It says "hey, look, we could be cool guys, just get drunk and smoke some weed first, please." It says, "I love college, not for it's rigorous engineering program but it's opportunities to play a dexterity based drinking game called beer pong," or "I love drinking debauchery because it has reliable rules like don't pass out with your shoes on and don't have sex if she's too gone. And ladies, I follow such rules."

Who knows, maybe when they go to college they'll uninstall Minecraft and wear sunglasses to house parties. Or perhaps their parents instilled work ethics instead of entitlement. I prefer to imagine they're celebrating not fitting the meta-narrative mold, because that means passing out at 3 will be in the library, and doing it again at 10 will help change the world. We can't be sure. The semiological meaning of various scenes leave me baffled.

Their idea of hazing a freshman (denoted by glasses, which is what nerds look like to kids wearing uniforms) is running up to him and repeatedly patting him down. What are they searching for, weed? Pogs?

There's a scene where they coolly open a locker, and proceed to stomp the living shit out of the notebooks that fall out. What is the object of your hate? Is it the nearness of the locker to the floor and the propensity of books to fall out of it? Or is it the books themselves? If that isn't a strong epistemological vote for "I Love College" then I don't know what is.

I also noticed the hilarious scene on the playground where Asher Roth says "you know what's going down," and visually before us is a slide. Is it satire?

What is Satire?blog

Satire makes us think while making us laugh. It is both a form of criticism and a form of humor. It is a time-honored rhetorical device which disarms a person long enough to conceive of a thing in a new way. It's like reverse psychology, where the desired thought process is achieved via negation, e.g., “This blog is awesome.” Lets take a stroll through satire as it applies to Satire?blog, shall we?

Satire is distinguished by the attempt to appear serious. A clown makes no attempt to be serious, and therefore is not satire (nor trusted). The less sincere the attempt, the more satire skews into lampoon. This sexual harassment short exploits sensitivity training hilariously. But it only superficially requires us to examine our attitudes towards sensitivity training because the docile responses from employees belie its seriousness. If they reacted more realistically the short would probably function better as a critique of overwrought sensitivity training videos. And it probably would be less funny.



Contrast this with Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal. Swift's attempt to appear serious is more genuine. His proposition to alleviate the burden of poverty by eating children is as severely inappropriate as suggesting to rub huge cocks together at the water cooler, but instead of letting the shock diminish he continues to press, developing his argument and leaving few traces that he is anything but sincere. Understanding on face value that Swift cannot be right, readers are forced to read closely in order to counter that, no, babies should not be eaten to alleviate poverty, at which point Swift has achieved his desired effect. Every reader will have a better conception of the dire poverty the Irish face and how greatly that desperation contrasts their own lives. A Modest Proposal is not that funny.

My amateur analysis* so far is suggesting that the satire spectrum is anchored by lampoon like the sexual harassment short on one end, and criticism like A Modest Proposal on the other, with the former being funnier and less persuasive than the later. But the The Onion News Network shows this dichotomy to be false since it is consistently funnier than sexual harassment and lays it's subjects even more bare than did Swift the privileged classes.

In any case, we are not interested in identifying deliberate satire because unbridled self-awareness, running roughshod over the last vestiges of innocence and authenticity, rend almost every portrayal a satire these days. I mean, can you even say freedom without a smirk or scare quotes anymore? Thanks media.

On this blog satire takes on a different dimension of meaning. When we ask “is it satire?” we seek not to classify yes or no, but just to genuinely wonder aloud. What the fuck is this? Is it satire? It sure looks like satire. In message board terminology, this would be the situation where you're unsure whether someone is sincere or trolling. Not sure if serious.... It's the disbelief when you detect a fart shortly after someone has left the room. At Satire?blog we will thrive in those moments.

Ask yourself, “if this is not satire of [some thing], then what would a satire of [that thing] look like?” If the answer is [still that thing] then you have an clear case of ambiguity. For example:



What the fuck is this? Is it real? Did they really write a song about Taco Bell and Pizza Hut? Is it supposed to be a satire of hip hop? If someone did satirize the mindless, weed-addled stupidity sloth of contemporary hip hop acts and/or their fans, wouldn't this be the song he produced?

In a cynical, meta, post-modern world, speculating on intent is the last means with which we can enjoy artistic creation. It's a head cocked-sideways. It's the ineffable feeling of “...quoi?” Won't you celebrate the ineffable with me?



P.S. I had to write that entire post without using the word irony. Its reclamation by hipsters caused a recession in the meaning market worse than the 1995 crash/release of Jagged Little Pill.

*reverse psychology