Professor David Peimer
Satire vs. Evil, Part 1: Kurt Weil/Brecht, Hitler’s Mein Kampf
Summary
Professor David Peimer examines many different aspects of satire, specifically in relation to German history. He looks at the different ways of understanding satire and different ways that artists, writers, and filmmakers employ satire. Part 1 of 2.
Professor David Peimer
David Peimer is a professor of theatre and performance studies in the UK. He has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and New York University (Global Division), and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. Born in South Africa, David has won numerous awards for playwriting and directing. He has written eleven plays and directed forty in places like South Africa, New York, Brussels, London, Berlin, Zulu Kingdom, Athens, and more. His writing has been published widely and he is the editor of Armed Response: Plays from South Africa (2009) and the interactive digital book Theatre in the Camps (2012). He is on the board of the Pinter Centre in London.
That’s a great question, Mark. I think that it reduces. I don’t think, it can like we saw in the “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” from Cabaret. It can elevate and then in order to reduce, so it’s showing intentionally or the Henry Goodman is an intentional elevation ‘cause it’s a performance. And then the reduction. When we consciously show in film or theatre that this is a conscience performance. It’s not an authentic self. And I think that’s the way that Brecht was pointing towards as a way of how contemporary satirists, certainly of his time and now, can try to take on this notion of extreme evil and how to, or evil, cetera.
Yes, I think it does. And I think whether it’s the fool in King Lear in Shakespeare, whether it’s the, you know, the ancient Greeks or whether it’s some of these people I’ve shown today, I think that ridicule has a very strong authority, precisely because of what it’s doing. You know, it’s reducing images of power to ordinary humanness. And power, people in power, never like that. They hate it. So it carries its own authority by being a kind of saboteur, you know, or Northrop Frye’s phrase, “ironically militant.” Betty Ray, the movie, Don’t Look Up, is an excellent example. Great one, thank you. I’m going to show one or two examples from Kubrick and others next week.
It was part of the tradition in ancient Greece. I mean, we’re going back two and a half thousand years ago. It was part of their tradition. We’re not sure exactly why, but it was the festival of Dionysus for the god of Dionysus, which was the guy who was the god of excess, wine, woman, and song, and to celebrate the excesses and sensualities of being alive. And they, according to all evidence that we find, the leaders would sit in the front and would laugh and love it. I think they saw that in the old adage, “Better to be talked about than not talked about.” You know, nothing worse than not being talked about if you’re trying to climb up the ladder of power.