How satirists have addressed the rise of corporate capitalism, from Dickens to The Office to corporate satire in digital media

By Dr. Ingrid Gustafsson, Ph.D. — satire.info

Corporate capitalism is among the most consistently productive targets in the history of satire, and its satirical treatment has evolved significantly as the nature and scale of corporate power have changed. From the satirical treatment of commercial culture in eighteenth-century periodical essays through Dickens’s satirical portraits of businessmen and financiers, through the satirical fiction of the early twentieth century (Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop), to the television satire of corporate culture in The Office, W1A, and Silicon Valley, to the contemporary satirical treatment of tech giants and their social consequences, the satirist’s engagement with corporate power has been continuous and formally inventive.

The Satirical Anatomy of Corporate Culture

Corporate culture provides the satirist with some of its most productive raw material precisely because it is so thoroughly saturated with performative language that bears no relationship to the reality it purports to describe. Management jargon, mission statements, corporate values documents, diversity initiatives that accomplish nothing, team-building exercises that achieve the opposite of team-building — all of these provide the satirist with what they need most: official discourse that is demonstrably disconnected from reality and that therefore creates the ironic gap that satirical argument requires. The Office (BBC, 2001-03), created by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, is the definitive satirical treatment of corporate culture in British television: its portrait of the Slough branch of a paper company uses the mockumentary format to expose the gap between the manager David Brent’s self-image (charismatic leader, natural entertainer, friend to all) and the reality of his conduct (incompetent, self-absorbed, destructive of the people he claims to support).

The satirical techniques most effective against corporate targets tend to be the ones that take corporate discourse seriously on its own terms and reveal its consequences: deadpan presentation of mission statements alongside the reality they describe, the naive observer who accepts corporate claims at face value and thereby exposes their absurdity, the logical extension of corporate values to conclusions that the corporations themselves would disavow. London business satire has a particularly rich tradition in this mode, and corporate satire’s academic study provides the framework for understanding these techniques in their historical and economic context. The satirist who engages with corporate power needs to understand corporate discourse well enough to parody it precisely, and to understand the specific mechanisms of corporate harm well enough to make the satirical argument politically consequential.

Source: satire.info | British Class System Satire