Satire as safety valve: Moving beyond a mistaken metaphor

The safety valve metaphor is ubiquitous in scholarship on satire and usually implies that, although the genre seems intent on upsetting the political order, it really has unintended conservative effects which maintain the status quo. Although there is previous criticism of the safety valve theory, which focuses on the inadequacy of its empirical predictions or the flawed theoretical foundations of the associated relief theory of humor, the metaphor remains in common use – and continues to obscure our understanding of satire’s political effects. What remains overlooked in humor studies is the fundamental mistakenness of the metaphor itself. We argue that comparing satire to a safety valve always implies a reasoning about the genre which is mistaken because the mechanistic function of a safety valve cannot be informatively mapped onto the political effects of satire. As a result, the safety valve metaphor is problematically opaque (because its actual meaning is unclear) and elastic (because it means whatever anyone wants it to mean). The metaphor fails to elucidate how satire works even in authoritarian political contexts, like Egypt, which should, in principle, act as a fertile ground for its purported function as a safety valve.