My Jokes Get Fact-Checked More Than Trump's Executive Orders
Satire isn't dead...it just has a hard time keeping up with comical nature of reality.
This ain’t my first rodeo, but in the past when jokes I post to Facebook and elsewhere would get “fact checked” by media outlets ranging from the AP to Snopes, it didn’t seem quite so…ominous, bizarre, or stupid. This has been happening with my satire almost from the very beginning when I wrote a piece about Elon Musk buying and deleting Facebook, which I also now regret for unwittingly painting him in any kind of “cool” light.
Now that it’s happening over and over again thanks to a series of blatantly fake Fox News chyrons, I’m not sure if it’s more dangerous, stupid, or satirical itself that my jokes are being fact-checked more rigorously than the anti-immigrant propaganda and rhetoric spewing out of the White House. Why are my jokes getting more attention and fact-checking than the Department of Homeland Security’s claims that their painted clown Kristi Noem’s purse just happened to be stolen by undocumented immigrants? People seem to have forgotten that Nazis would literally make-up crimes that their undesirables committed to foment hate among the German people.
I’ve genuinely lost track of how many times it’s happened in the past ten years, and I’ll truly never get over the fact that my super-obvious jokes and satire are treated like they’re attempted disinformation, or dangerous left-wing propaganda if not fact-checked. It’s comical to me, really, that it keeps happening. In my mind, it should be ridiculously obvious that the Trump regime, while fascist, idiotic, corrupt, and transparently evil, wouldn’t say or do the things I assign to their thoughts and actions quite as profanely, or in such a way that makes their subtext the context.
But I also understand that the very nature of the satire I do is meant to be at least somewhat deceitful, just in a playful, “made you look,” kind of way. In these times, when we have a firehose of lies blasting at full force from the most powerful office ever created, my stuff can be so over target, it’s hard to delineate their crazy from my mocking of their crazy. But…not that hard.
Over the last week and a half, I’ve had Snopes writers contact me almost a half-dozen times about fake quotes I made-up and attributed to Attorney General Pamela Q. Trumptaint and others in the administration. I intend to fully assert my First Amendment rights until they drag me to El Salvador, so I hope that at some point Snopes can stop calling me someone who “refers to themselves as a satirist and comedian,” and refer people to the fact that I am a comedian and therefore nobody should be taking anything with my watermark seriously, but I won’t hold my breath.
I grew up in a world where if someone said that the president called something “high imperial treason,” media literacy would kick-in, people would realize it’s a joke or satire, and then the world would move on. Not in today’s timeline. In today’s timeline, that gets you a fact-check from Snopes.
If you Google “James Schlarmann fact check” you will find a litany of fake news articles and news headlines I’ve written that have needed to get debunked by straight news sources over the years. In some ways, I suppose it’s a feather in the cap, but in most ways it’s just kind of a sad canary in the coal mine of media literacy, partisanship, and democracy. I always tell people that “reality is satirical,” and I guess my jokes getting fact-checked is the ultimate proof of that fact.
Yet, I dare to dream.
I dare to dream of a world where politicians’ lies are fact-checked more aggressively than my jokes. I dream of a world where I won’t get chastised by the left for daring to joke, and I won’t get called a groomer by the right for daring to tell jokes about them being the real groomers. It would be a world in which there would have only ever needed to be a single “fact check” of my work, and then from that point forward, people would see my name attached to it and know it’s not something I’m trying to earnestly convince you is real.
I do kind of find it hilarious that someone tried to ask Trump about my joke, though.
What I really dream of is a day where Donald Trump’s executive orders get flagged by Facebook every time he lies and says they’re “law.” I know that day isn’t coming, because even so-called “liberal media” outlets are run by rich, conservative men who have a vested interest in whitewashing the news and keeping us angry at each other over social issues, but still…a clown can dream, can he not?
A clown can dream.