Killer Satire

You've probably heard of the Grand Theft Auto videogame franchise. You know, the one with lots of inexplicable violence, minutely recreated cities like Miami, Los Angeles and, most recently New York. Since its release in April, the most recent installment, GTA IV, has already earned its maker, Rockstar North about $600 million. Even more noteworthy than its financial prowess, however, is how funny GTA IV is — and not in the nasty, frat-boy way that crept into some of the earlier titles.

Remember Blazing Saddles? Yes, there's the scene in which the cowboys have terrible gas after eating too many beans, and you kind of roll you eyes, because, well, because its kind of juvenile. But there are also moments of sublime humor — angry, funny and true all at once — like the opening of the movie, where we come across a bunch of 19th century Chinese immigrants toiling in the hot sun on the railroad. One of them passes out and the foreman, a cowboy, says, "Dock that Chink a day's pay for napping on the job."

While you probably couldn't get away with using the word "Chink" in the first line of any movie today, it's pretty obvious that Brooks is not mocking the Chinese immigrant but rather the culture that calls him such a name. It's funny and disturbing all at once, because it shoves in our face something generally unspoken but true — the railways were built by immigrant labor often in inhuman and even deadly conditions for little pay and certainly no appreciation. While Blazing Saddles is sometimes written off as just a parody of an old Western, it's much more than that. It's satire. It's about hypocrisy, racism, and, yes, even genocide — and it's successful satire because it makes us laugh at these things, at the absurdity of them, in the true existentialist meaning of the word.

Grand Theft Auto IV has its farting scenes, but it's also a near-brilliant satire, not of the American old West but of contemporary American consumerist culture.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word "satire" comes from the Latin phrase lanx satura, which seems to have meant a dish containing fruits and food made of many different ingredients. (The dishes were considered witty.) It is defined as a poem in which prevailing vices or follies are held up for ridicule. In his 1729 pamphlet, A Modest Proposal, Jonathan Swift suggested the Irish sell their children for food. Two hundred and fifty years later, Monty Python hosted Upper Class Twit of the Year awards. Today, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert skewer contemporary news so adeptly as to reach a whole new level of truth. And so it is with Grand Theft Auto IV. It rips into our reliance on cheap foreign labor, our xenophobia, the low level of our pop culture, and the post-September 11th fear mongering of the right-wing. Its faux-New York world is guarded not by the Statue of Liberty but by the Statue of Happiness, (her torch of freedom replaced by a to-go coffee cup.) The motto of the coffee company in the game is "all beans picked lovingly by small children in third world countries."

Videogames, unlike verse, novels, movies and TV shows do not have a long tradition of using satire effectively. In part this is because humor is not a huge component in videogames, but it's more than that. (Humor is not actually a prerequisite for satire. In fact, the OED says humor might have been introduced to make the biting quality of satire more palatable.) The real reason videogames tend to steer clear of satire - and certainly effective satire — is that videogames have not traditionally been about skewering anybody (other than zombies and the such). The history of mainstream videogames is at best characterized as adamantly apolitical. And satire by nature has political overtones. Satire asks the viewer to see their world in a different light, to question prevailing values or mores or ways of being. Satire has a layer of anger beneath it, no matter how much it makes you laugh.

The Statue of Happiness from GTA IV

While there is a traditional plot line that runs through Grand Theft Auto IV, a big part of the game's appeal is the off-kilter universe in which players are free to roam. (The open-world game play is a hallmark of the entire Grand Theft Auto series.) All GTA games, for example, have radio stations, but GTA IV takes it to a new level where the merely funny becomes the deeply satirical. Weasel News is the right wing station. A caller to the station complains that schools still teach geography. "Who cares?" she says. "They're just places where terrorists come from." To which the host heartily agrees pointing out in a pitch-perfect imitation of our own shock jocks that, after all, foreigners are just people who don't bathe as often as 'we' do, and goes on to rant, "This is the land of the free but not the free lunch for immigrants — even if they are serving it. It shouldn't be free." On another radio show, Just or Unjust, a screaming judge makes sexist remarks to the woman, while applauding her ex-boyfriend's abusive treatment. It's disturbing but it's funny in its nuanced mimicry of real-world sexism.

Times Square, called Star Junction, is filled with posters for ludicrous fake fashion companies, like Derriere, which is essentially a poster of a big butt adorned with a jewel. There are blaring posters in the square for credit card companies like Shark: Extortionist Value. The Bank of Liberty City's motto scrolls around and around in blinking lights: "Bleeding you dry!" it says.

Rusty's Fudge Packed Donuts offer a police menu, and VIP Ringtones asks "What is the price of individuality?" while offering you tones for hundreds of dollars. If you take a ride from a helicopter service over the city, the pilot will make comments like, "It sure is nice flying this chopper over Liberty City. It sure beats mowing down a village of full of hostiles!"

There are also TV shows and an Internet in the game. The TV broadcasts shows like Republican Space Rangers, and, instead of American Idol, American Asshole. On the Internet, the Craigslist equivalent has headings like "Political Group Seeks Cause and Scapegoat." One company, Outsource America, has a Web site that proclaims, "Ever since sportswear companies realized they could get emaciated 8-year-old girls to better themselves by working 120 hours a week for a few cents a day, businesses have been unable to resist the allure of hardworking, inexpensive foreign labor."

Somewhere, Chaucer, Swift, and Mel Brooks are smiling.