In 2007 SNL had the unenviable job of responding to inflammatory comments made by the then-president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, renowned for both denying the historical occurrence of the Holocaust as well as the fact of gay people existing in Iran. In response to these claims, the Lonely Island (a sketch group consisting of Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, and Akiva Schaffer) wrote and performed their SNL Digital Short “Iran So Far”, a mock parody song about a man (played by Samberg) who has fallen in love with Ahmadinejad.
The sketch aligns with André Jolles’s criteria for a joke, which consists of both satire (or irony, though in this case satire is used)—a “mockery of that which we condemn […] at a distance” (207)—and jest—comedy aimed at a “general state of affairs” (209). “Iran So Far” consists both of an unbinding of Ahmadinejad’s harmful rhetoric and a parodic representation of the American music industry, simultaneously grounding it in sharp satire and broadening the audience for the joke to include those not familiar with the issue it takes aim at.
“Iran So Far” satirizes Ahmadinejad’s comments, unbinding them from their contexts and reshaping them as declarations of love. Throughout this sketch, the Lonely Island uncouples the harmful context from the footage of Ahmadinejad, effectively neutralizing the political power of his statements and in fact turning them into the very thing he seeks to deny—a queer love story. These jokes border on pointed insult at times—it’s not easy to turn Holocaust denial into a joke about queer Jewish BDSM, but somehow the Lonely Island pulls it off.
This satire is coupled with broader jokes—Jolles’s “jest”—referencing the American music scene against which the Lonely Island released their sketch. Both the sketch’s title and chorus reference the bizarrely named band Flock of Seagulls’ 1982 hit “I Ran (So Far Away)”, and the music video includes visual references to Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’s “Empire State of Mind”, including shots of Samberg playing piano atop a moving vehicle on the streets of New York City and closeup shots of him smashing random keys. It also features Adam Levine, who at the time was a well-known popstar (and thankfully is no longer). These references add a broader jest to the pointed satire, something which, in Jolles’s theory, “both undoes the inadequate structure and dissolves a tension” (209).
Works Cited:
André Jolles, “Joke,” Simple Forms, trans. Schwartz (London: Verso, 2017), 201-212.
Saturday Night Live, “Iran So Far”, 3:32. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoS8DrrlnTQ.
This is such a good example of the concepts explored in Jolles’s writing, especially how satire is specifically defined as a mockery of a state of affairs “at a distance” to an audience which may or may not be familiar with it — which is perfectly illustrated in this song.