The Wit’s Guide to Travesties

Or, sad parodies

This is one detail from Travesty, Konstantin Altunin, 2013; there are more below.

Why does everything feel like a travesty these days? Because, as Karl Marx observed, history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce. And history’s accelerating, either because we’re stepping on the gas despite a climate crisis or simply rolling downhill. It follows that, to have any chance of making it to the next epoch on time, or at least fashionably late, we need to cycle through history as tragedy and farce at the same time. And since tragedy + farce = travesty, here we are.

“The ‘English muffin’ was a travesty of both Englishness and muffindom.”
— Christopher Hitchens

Is a travesty a joke or an abomination? Yes, and there’s no better example than Travesty, the above painting by Russian artist Konstantin Altunin. It depicts Vladimir Putin and Dimitry Medvedev in women’s underwear, thus paying homage to the Italian travestire, literally meaning to cross dress. (It is a sub-travesty that the cropped detail depicted above doesn’t do justice to Medvedev’s spectacular décolletage.) The abomination part came in 2013 when the painting was seized by authorities in St Petersburg for no stated reason, forcing the artist into exile in Paris. And the tragedy landed when he died, apparently at his own hand, last December at the age of 56. “Dites-leur que je suis mort comme Van Gogh,” his wife wrote on his Instagram account: Tell them I died like Van Gogh. A travesty.

“This trial is a travesty; it’s a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham. I move for a mistrial.”
— Woody Allen

The 1974 Tom Stoppard play Travesties features an improbable meeting of James Joyce, Vladimir Lenin, and Tristan Tzara amidst a production of The Importance of Being Earnest and proceeds to suggest that the original working title of Ulysses was Elasticated Bloomers. The 1993 Steve Martin play Picasso at the Lapin Agile features an improbable meeting of Pablo Picasso, Albert Einstein, and Elvis Presley. Is the latter a travesty of Travesties? Nah. I’d say both are worth seeing.

“Champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends.”
— Traditional toast

Let’s say that for some reason we wanted more travesties. We could turn to a travesty generator. This is the amusing name given to computer programs that spit out nonsense, essentially predictive text generators from way back before AI made them somewhat useful. Wonderfully, one such program is called Dissociated Press, and it’s pretty effective at instantly generating surreal parodies of source texts. Similarly, a program called Travesty was used to recombine parts of Ulysses in 1984, creating lines like “Gleaming harnesses, petticoats on slim ass rain” and proving that Stoppard was onto something.

Petticoats for my real friends and real coats for my petty friends!
Ladybugs for my real friends and real bugs for my lady friends!
Faux hawks for my real friends and real hawks for my faux friends!
— Randall Munroe

So to recap via travesty generator: These muffins are a travesty, and history gasps downhill. We’re rolling epochs through elastic nonsense, stepping on tragic fashionably late shams. And history + abomination = décolletage.

“Red Delicious apples, whose misleading name is a travesty.”
— Randall Munroe

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What Would Werner Herzog Do?

As Canada’s postal strike lurches into its third week, I remain unable to send my paying subscribers their Riposte Cards. Does that mean I should give up the ghost? Throw in the towel? Pull the plug? Certainly not! The subject of December’s Riposte Card is my guiding light:

To receive this beautiful portrait of Werner Herzog by Silas Kaufman in the mail, assuming we once again have mail, upgrade your subscription today!

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Quote Vote

“What a travesty to think religion means saving my little soul through my little good deeds and the rest of the world go hang.”
— Gerald Vann

As I found with previous installments on Frolic, Puttering, and Portmanteaux, funny words take things in unexpected directions. And as ever, you the reader point the way.

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I couldn’t find a way to organically work the book Travesty Generator into Issue No. 283 of Get Wit Quick, so I’ll mention it here. The 2019 work by poet Lillian-Yvonne Bertram uses repeating algorithms to generate elegies for the likes of Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, and Emmett Till, with results that read as hauntingly garbled permutations of “I can’t breathe.” It’s both kinds of travesty at once, wordplay that’s deadly serious. If my 2014 book Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting is garbled, it’s not hauntingly so. Tap the ❤️ below to elasticate all the bloomers, within reason.